The advent of computer systems for information acquisition, as well as the increasingly information intensive society in which we live, result in decision makers routinely being required to assimilate larger and larger amounts of information, much of which, in fact, is produced by automated information gathering systems. Unfortunately, this information load continues for the most part to be reported as alphanumeric information, either in printed reports or via other display systems such as computer terminals. The human brain, however, is a better image processor than it is a calculator or character processor. Thus, while the brain is capable of assimilating and using alphanumeric information, it more rapidly assimilates images. It is, therefore, desirable that new methodologies of data display be developed which take advantage of these processing characteristics of the human brain.
Barriers to rapid understanding also result from language differences. For example, although people worldwide recognize the image of a chair, its description in textual form appears different in different languages. Similarly, descriptions of more complex datasets also appear different because of the different characters sets used around the world to describe them.
With regard to the practice of medicine, physicians around the world make decisions based on substantially the same information, for example values of electrolytes, hemoglobin, etc. However, the representations of such information in, for example, Japanese are likely to be totally unintelligible to a physician conversant in only English.